


Founders Headcanons

by joisbishmyoga



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Headcanon, historical accuracy is a thing jkr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 12:14:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10786566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joisbishmyoga/pseuds/joisbishmyoga
Summary: I just have access to etymology.org and wikipedia, and I have very strong headcanons about the Four Founders ok?





	Founders Headcanons

The Four Founders were NOT contemporous.

1\. The true Founder of the school was Helga, a Norse-Briton witch from York under the Danelaw, born c. 950 AD. Most of England at the time was under Viking rule, though the actual details include ongoing battles between the Danes and English. Fed up with how war and kingly whim were putting students at risk (and ruining her livelihood; never let it be said Helga wasn't practical), she negotiated a parcel of unuseable land out of the Scots to her north, a place centrally located to the Norse-mix students of Ireland, England, the Hebrides, Shetland, and Norway, and started a school. Part of the deal was to allow Scottish students in, thus setting the foundations for Hogwarts' 20th-century "school district" incidentally matching the UK's boundaries pretty well. (Norway lost its entire wizarding population during the Black Death, and thus left Hogwarts' "district". Its current wizarding population consists entirely of Danes, from the 400 years it was under Danish rule, and expats returned from Iceland, all of whom prefer Durmstrang.)

  
(The school was not originally going to be named Hogwarts, but YOU try carving "Helga's School of the Arts" when YOU'RE seeing double and too dizzy to sit up after casting a full teams' worth of wards and expanding a watchtower into a keep all on your lonesome.)

  
Hogsmeade was put on the only bit of land that was flat enough to be tilled at all. This is why the land was unuseable; except for the lake and the cliff point where the watchtower was, everything was too steep to farm. And the cliff point didn't have enough topsoil to grow on. In any case, Hogsmeade itself was little more than wheat fields and House Elves for the first three centuries of the school's life.

  
2\. Rowena Hraefenclew, born c. 1050 in Northumbria, was in the first set of children to begin Hogwarts at eleven without any older year-mates. This had taken nearly fifty years to reach, though; an entire generation of hedgewitches and specialists had to be taught remedially, and a lot of die-hard traditionalists had to, well, die off and take their apprenticeships-only ideals with them. Apprenticeships wouldn't fully fade for centuries, though, and are still used at what Muggles would call a university level in some fields.

  
After her education at Hogwarts, Rowena dived straight into research, and only came up for air (and a teaching career) once she nearly beggared herself on books. Within five years of teaching, she convinced Helga -- who by then was in the last years of her life -- to separate out students based on literacy, as many were coming in already capable of it.  
She became the school's second Headmistress, and expanded the keep to add a library -- which was more of a vault the classroom books would be pulled into at night than a modern-style library -- and to put the literate students on a separate floor to prevent bullying.

  
3\. Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin (born c. 1225) WERE contemporaries, though it's not known which is the elder or if they were even Hogwarts students at the same time. They did, however, use Hraefenclew's precendent to establish their own Houses early in the Hundred Years' War; Slytherin to take on noble children and train them in their duties, and Gryffindor to do the same for knights.

  
Godric Gryffindor was born near the Welsh border, to a line of Norman knights who'd intermarried with native highborn women. He almost didn't get to go to Hogwarts at all, but his magical mother interceded with his father, the Headmaster, and Godric's lord -- via the lord's wife -- to allow Gryffindor Sr. to train Godric at the castle. Through the judicious use of magic, multitasking, and near-elimination of sleep, Godric successfully completed his squireship and magical education within the expected seven years, and served his lord faithfully until it came time to squire his son through Hogwarts under a similar arrangement.

  
Salazar Slytherin, though he was widely believed to be the third or fourth son of a lesser noble, was in fact the son of a Basque fisherman and an English port wife in the vicinity of Plymouth. The Basques were for the most part wealthy and well-connected at the time, and only getting moreso as the demand for fish rose with the dietary commands of the Catholic Church (by the 16th century, nearly half the days of the year were "meatless", allowing only fish). Young Salazar developed a good relationship with his father and, through the man's connections and wealth, traveled widely in his youth. He spent his middle years putting himself about as a tutor to noble children, and returned to Hogwarts on the eve of the Hundred Years' War, c. 1335. He developed a powerful alliance (and friendship) with Gryffindor to get noble magical children away from said war, though with the founding of Beauxbatons in 1310 they were unable to coax French lordlings to Hogwarts where they could safely make friends with the English.

  
4\. Hufflepuff House was named by (a Gryffindor- and Slytherin-dominated) committee in the late 1600s, after the reasons for Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, and Slytherin Houses were forgotten and they'd become mere personality descriptors. The Sorting Hat was enchanted at this time by the same committee, and House mottos put in place. This is why "Hufflepuff" has about the same meaning as "blowhard", and why Ravenclaw's House motto is a Shakespearean dick joke. (That second one was totally the fault of Valentine Prewitt and the letters A-L-E).


End file.
